This book addresses a number of concerns that have emerged in recent scholarship on the nineteenth century. It contributes to existing dialogues that consider how the nineteenth century can be thought about and critically rethought through literature and other kinds of textual production. The book offers a theoretical consideration of the concept of the nineteenth century by considering Walter Benjamin's famous work The Arcades Project, focusing on Arnold Bennett's entitled 'The Rising Storm of Life'. It outlines how recent developments in Gothic studies have provided new ways of critically reflecting upon the nineteenth century. The book draws attention to the global scope of Victorian literature, and explores the exchanges which took place between Indian and British cultures. It argues that attending to the fashioning of American texts by British publishers enables people to rethink the emergence of American literature as a material as well as an imaginative phenomenon. The relationship between literature and the European anatomical culture is carried out by exploring nineteenth-century narratives from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in the first decades of the nineteenth-century to Charles Dickens's fiction in the 1860s. Historical fiction writers' persistent fascination with the long nineteenth century enacts a simultaneous drawing near to and distancing from the period, the lives of its inhabitants and its cultural icons, aesthetic discourses and canonical works. Adaptive practice in the neo-Victorian novel, applied both to Victorian literary precursors and the period more generally, may be better described as adaptive reuse or, perhaps appropriative reuse.

series, also titled ‘Interventions: Rethinking the Nineteenth Century’, published
by Manchester University Press. This series (also edited by us) aims to provide a space in
which scholars can reflect on the nature, scope, and direction of nineteenth-century studies.
Whilst wishing to support ongoing research into the period it also aims to foster unorthodox
approaches to the nineteenth century which challenge and problematise conventional models of
the Victorians and to that end it engages with a notion of the long nineteenth century

The material production of American literature in nineteenth-century Britain

Katie McGettigan

‘domestic’ by echoing the symbolic domestic spaces in The Guardian
Angel itself, within discussions of American literature being circulated abroad.
Holmes’s letter suggests that a British edition of an American book might construct an
American space outside of the nation itself, and that these American books could create
transatlantic communication.
Holmes perceives the interventions of British publishers as antithetical
to this aim; this chapter, however, argues the opposite. It suggests the material interventions of

’s subtle contemporaneousness , helping to
explain the Victorians’ conversion into such hypocritical embodiments of all-consuming
western cultural imperialism and dreams of world domination run amok. Wanting was
written at a time of high profile public debates about the legitimacy and efficacy of the
US-led NATO military intervention in Afghanistan combatting what might be termed the
‘terrorist desires’ of armed non-state organisations such as the Taliban and
al-Qaeda to contest western ideology and geopolitical spheres

because it might contribute to a reassessment of the
relationship between Romanticism and Victorianism, but also because of its implications for
methodological divisions between (new) historicist and (new) formalist approaches to the
poetry of both periods. This division is described by Marjorie Levinson as the ‘dual
commitment of materialist
critique’, taking ‘materialist’ to mean both ‘an intervention
practice taking the general form of ideology critique’ and ‘an attachment to
effects that resist re

Liberalism and liberalisation in the niche of nature, culture, and technology

Regenia Gagnier

limits and contingency of one’s own perspective.
This chapter will consider some implications for Victorian Studies
suggested by recent developments in the fields of world literatures and globalisation
studies. It will draw attention to the global scope of Victorian literature as an actant in
world affairs, as in processes of liberalisation, democratisation, and trade, but also to
the specificity of each local environment and moment of transculturation. It hopes to make a
methodological intervention on behalf of

fairy tales. Despite her literary intervention Steel styles herself as a
collector rather than translator of the tales:
That is neither a transliteration–which would have needed a
whole dictionary to be intelligible–nor a version orientalised to suit English
tastes. It is an attempt to translate one colloquialism by another, and thus to preserve
the aroma of rough ready wit existing side by side with that perfume of pure poesy which
every now and again contrasts so strangely with the other

“Interventions” was the organizing term for the presentations of
three Baldwin scholars at the Modern Language Association Convention in Chicago
in January of 2019. Baldwin’s travels and activities in spaces not
traditionally associated with him, including the U.S. South and West, represent
interventions of a quite literal type, while his aesthetic and critical
encounters with these and other cultures, including twenty-first-century
contexts of racial, and racist, affect—as in the case of Raoul
Peck’s 2016 film I Am Not Your Negro—provide
opportunities to reconsider his work as it contributes to new thinking about
race, space, property, citizenship, and aesthetics.

The nineteenth-century fear of hell is so terrible as to be itself an experience of hell; if so, it is a fearfully acute apprehension of the infinite distance housed within seemingly finite time. There can be no talk, no measuring, of the length of the nineteenth century without reference to hell, and the fear thereof. The Arcadist's account of the nineteenth century explodes in so many directions that it defeats all attempts to measure it. The strange lesson of Edgar Allan Poe's The Man of the Crowd, the short story seized upon by the Arcadist as, in effect, an allegory of the nineteenth century, the century of the crowd. The face of the twentieth century would seem, however, to be nearly completed, more decidable. The face in the motor-car that is chauffeur-driven through the streets of central London in Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway is a world-historical face.

This chapter critically reflects on the interface between literature and science in the long nineteenth century. The literature-science field has been characteristically concerned with the transmission of thought and its conveyance by the material channels of technological media. The chapter considers the case of a 'transitional' literary writer Arnold Bennett and examines the aspects of his novel-writing practice that speak of his subtle engagement with Victorian ideas about day-to-day science and technology. It explores Bennett's essay The Rising Storm of Life as a magazine publication which provides a context for reflecting on more direct exchanges between popular writing and scientific ideas. The detail that Bennett employs is indicative of what might be seen as an investment in Herbert Spencer's radical Victorian scientific philosophy. This philosophy has been somewhat overlooked in work on Victorian literature and science, given Charles Darwin's prominence.